All the Bad Spots Are Taken: A Selection from David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021)

“In academic thought, there’s another popular way of propping up the myth of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and thereby writing off people like the Calusa as evolutionary quirks or anomalies. This is to claim that they only behaved the way they did because they were living in ‘atypical’ environments. Usually, what’s meant by ‘atypical’ are wetlands of various sorts – coasts and river valleys – as opposed to the remoter corners of tropical forests or desert margins, which is assumed to be where hunter-gatherers really ought to be living, since that is where most of them live today. It is a particularly weird argument, but a lot of very serious people make it, so we’ll briefly have to take it on.

Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid twentieth century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That’s why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle. Ten thousand years ago, this was obviously not the case. Everyone was a forager; overall population densities were low. Foragers were therefore free to live in pretty much any sort of territory they fancied. All things being equal, those living off wild resources would tend to cleave to places where they were abundant. You would think this is self-evident, but apparently it isn’t.

Those who today describe people like the Calusa as ‘atypical’ because they had such a prosperous resource base want us to believe, instead, that ancient foragers chose to avoid locations of this kind, shunning the rivers and coasts (which also offered natural arteries for movement and communication), because they were so keen to oblige later researchers by resembling twentieth-century hunter-gatherers (the sort for which detailed scientific data is available today). We are asked to believe that it was only after they ran out of deserts and mountains and rainforests that they reluctantly started to colonize richer and more comfortable environments. We might call this the ‘all the bad spots are taken!’ argument.”—David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)